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July 19, 2008

No Longer A Child Of The Universe

Possibly 99 percent of you who came across the obituary this week of radio and television host Les Crane would not have recognized the name. That is certainly understandable as Mr. Crane's public fame waned about 35 years agobut here are three fascinating things about the man we lost Sunday at age 74.

1. In the early 1960s he was one of the early pioneers of modern talk radio with his frank opinions and confrontational style on KGO San Francisco. He was one of the first to take live listener calls on the air too.

2. The first American television appearance of the Rolling Stones was on Crane's late night ABC show in June 1964. That summer the program aired at 11:30 p.m., becoming one of the many shows to fall to young Johnny Carson's ratings dominance.

3. He was married five times - his fourth wife was Tina Louise, "Ginger" from TV's Gilligan's Island.

However even without any of that, Les Crane's passing would have been notable for his memorable Top Ten pop single from 1971. He even won a Grammy for his spoken-word recording of a 1927 poem called The Desiderata. This was the 70s version of that silly Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen) song that was a hit by Baz Luhrmann about ten years ago.

As nearly vacant as the memories of my early years are, I vividly remember hearing The Desiderata (Latin for "desired things," by the way) on the radio during its chart run.

And like millions of other young people back then I also had a poster on my bedroom wall of the lyrics to the poem.

If you are old like me, click on the player below to relive your own memory of the song. And you are lucky enough to be young, hit play too and prepare to be embarrassed for my generation that this song was actually taken seriously at the time.

I'm ashamed to admit that I remember the song, but the memory of the poster is much stronger - my older sister had it hanging on her bedroom wall until she graduated from high school in 1975. It was a black and white photograph of a distant man in a dark landscape, with a dark cloudy sky. To me, it was a picture of loneliness. I read the poem many, many times, trying to figure it out (I was still in grammar school).

The thing that fascinated me most was the little squiggly characters within the text that notated the paragraph breaks - instead of the traditional paragraph symbol, the printer used squiggly lines that, for some silly reason, really held my attention. Probably some weird 1970's subliminal message or something...

The National Lampoon version called "Deteriorata" is hilarious. It end with the immortal words: Give up. The chorus is: You are a fluke of the universe. And some of its advice includes" Rotate your tires. It's brilliant.

Wow -- I've been on vacation for a couple of weeks and was just catching up with the blog. Now this just THROWS me back to the 70s!! My 30 year reunion is coming up this year ... maybe we should put this one on the hit list. As always, thanks for the stroll down memory lane! Have a great one!